My colleague here at The Stream, Michael Brown, recently asked a valid, legitimate question which deserves a serious answer:

Can someone explain this to me? I’m a two-time Trump voter, I’ve said that, in my view, a pro-life Christian cannot vote for a Democratic presidential candidate & that for the vast majority of Christian conservatives, Trump would be their candidate of choice. Yet the moment I…

— Dr. Michael L. Brown (@DrMichaelLBrown) July 24, 2024

And I’d like to offer that answer, with all the sobriety and respect deserved when we come to “reason together.”

My answer is simple: People respond that way because they’re terrified. And they have every right to be. We face a vast movement of political and economic forces that hate us — for being Christian, or being white, or being in any traditional sense American. It’s not the dry disdain of snobbish WASPs who didn’t want Jews in their country clubs, nor the panic of racist whites who didn’t want blacks in their neighborhoods.

It’s the visceral, murderous hate the minority Tutsis heard in Rwanda, when their government started calling them “cockroaches” on TV. The hate that Hamas supporters vent on Jewish students they drive off campus. The hate that burned churches in Soviet Russia, synagogues in Nazi Germany, and is burning historic churches right this moment in Europe and Canada. It’s the hate black Marxists in South Africa vent when they sing “Kill the Boer!” It’s the hate many people expressed when they said they wished that Trump’s assassin hadn’t missed.

Such Reckless Hate

I’m reminded of the scene in The Two Towers when King Theoden thinks the orcs are about to take his citadel and massacre all its inhabitants. With him I find myself asking, “What can men do against such reckless hate?”

One thing Theoden can’t do and shouldn’t do is turn the other cheek, as his traitorous courtier Wormtongue has long advised him. That injunction of Jesus’s was meant for minor offenses against our pride. It wasn’t a call to surrender, to leave the innocent helpless in the face of organized violence.

When we face people who want to “abolish whiteness,” censor the media, declare Christians to be unfit parents, open the borders to countless illegal immigrants and wink when they lawlessly vote, imprison peaceful pro-lifers for praying, turn rioters loose, infiltrate churches with FBI spies, sterilize children without their parents’ knowledge, and cover up the facts about Donald Trump’s near-murder, we grow afraid, and rightly so.

We rally to the leader who’s willing to wade into the fray and get himself bloody — as Trump literally did when they tried to murder him two weeks ago. Now Newsweek and the FBI director are actually trying to gaslight us that Trump might not have been shot at all. Google has gamed its search function to hide news accounts of the shooting:

Wow. Google is shadow banning the assassination attempt on Trump in their search results.

It’s like it never happened. pic.twitter.com/ZjDqZjdVYe

— William Wolfe 🇺🇸 (@William_E_Wolfe) July 28, 2024

ChatGPT has gotten the same memo as Google:

ChatGPT says there’s no verified information or evidence that Trump was almost ass*ssin*ted and there have been no attempts.

They’re erasing history in real time. pic.twitter.com/43RqAbgb1h

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 28, 2024

When that’s happening before our very eyes, we aren’t thinking of abstract principles of civics, or even the Great Commission. We’re wondering if we and our kids might end up behind barbed wire in camps.

Band Together to Get Through the Blitz

We don’t mistake Trump for a messiah, a religious leader, or even a wholly virtuous man. If some of us goofily conclude that he’s God’s anointed or something, the rest of us just shrug. We understand and forgive. Don’t expect the people facing persecution to reason with the detachment of a tenured professor of philosophy. Don’t expect Londoners getting bombed in 1940 to coolly critique the flaws in Winston Churchill’s embrace of British imperialism. In this sense, Eric Trump wasn’t wholly wrong when he said that the GOP must worry about the “hole in the roof” (open, lawless borders) not the “spot in the basement” (abortion).

Now, spots in the basement can be deadly serious. They might mean your home is infected with dangerous toxic mold. They might be signs of asbestos, which could poison your whole family. And abortion is that kind of evil, which sows violence and chaos in the bedroom and in the womb — undermining the most basic truths about human life itself. But don’t finger wag at men for not addressing such long-term evils when bombs are falling from the sky. As I wrote here recently, the struggle against abortion is like the fight against slavery and racism in America — a matter of decades and centuries, not a few election cycles.

Like other pro-lifers, I was deeply upset by the changes Donald Trump personally dictated in the GOP platform this year, removing pro-life and pro-family language. That was a tragic necessity, I fear, given how weak much of the pro-life movement has proven in the wake of the Dobbs decision. We haven’t convinced the country that abortion is evil. And that’s our job — not winning hollow victories in back-room committee meetings.

On the more positive side, instead of repeating abstract free market and “classical” liberal principles, the platform is unabashedly nationalist, addressing the common good and well-being of ordinary Americans. Trump recognizes that America is not just some “propositional nation” like Soviet Russia, but a concrete place with a valuable, fragile culture. You can’t dump the whole Third World across our borders and expect our system to survive. This shift is something I’ve been calling for since 2003 — in an essay which J.D. Vance apparently channeled in a recent speech.

Vote Borat Early and Often

On a lighter note, my favorite planks in the platform were the first two:

1. Trumpistan is greatest country in the world. All other countries are run by little girls.
2. Trumpistan #1 exporter of potassium. Other countries have inferior potassium.

And I loved it when Kid Rock led the convention crowd in actually singing the platform as an anthem:

Okay, okay, I jest. But given all the professional wrestlers, weird media types (including pro-Satan speaker Amber Rose), and the general cult of personality at the GOP convention, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the GOP has kind of become the Borat Party.

And I for one will ballot harvest for Borat, with no illusions. If we win this election, we must resume the fight for natural law principles inside the Republican Party. If we lose it, such arguments will seem quaint to historians when they dig them up from the ruins.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.